You want to take out methane – the greenhouse super gas – from the atmosphere? Then you need copper enhanced zeolite. When warmed up to 310° Celsius it eats it all up. But it does have a catch.
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Currently, the biggest climate villain is carbon dioxide. But there are ever worse greenhouse gases such as methane. This gas gets released into the atmosphere through both natural processes and human activity. Technologies that catch and remove substantial amounts of methane from the atmosphere could become a major part of the climate change solution.
Experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came up with a new way to remove methane from the atmosphere that is cheap and works even in low methane concentrations. This new method is based on zeolite a popular aluminum-silicon-based material with a microporous structure. Zeolite has plenty of applications. For example, they are well known by cat owners as they are part of the bedding in cat toilets.
The team from MIT found out that when you enhance the zeolite with copper the resulting material is great at absorbing methane from the surrounding air. To test this in a laboratory they put the copper enhanced zeolite into a test tube and let air with different concentrations of methane flow over it. The concentrations ranged from 2 parts per million to 2 percent covering the values at which methane can be reasonably found in the atmosphere. They are heated up the test tubes to observe how temperature affects the absorbing process.
The experiments show that when the copper enhanced zeolite reaches 310 degrees Celsius it is capable of absorbing 100 percent of the surrounding methane. This is a much lower temperature than previous methods that remove methane from the atmosphere. And on top of that, the process works with much lower concentrations of methane than other methods. Low working temperature and high efficiency almost guarantee its chances for practical use.
Sadly, it does have a catch. The methane is turned into carbon dioxide. This might seem pretty bad as carbon dioxide is also a greenhouse gas. But it should be worth it. If we caught just half of the current atmospheric methane it would increase the amount of carbon dioxide by 0.2 percent but it would reduce the greenhouse warming effect by 16 percent.
The most promising places for the zeolite method should be coal mines and cow farms where you can usually find pockets of concentrated methane. And it shouldn’t be technologically hard to install the methane traps in the places either as you could put it into existing ventilation systems. But development still needs to be done as there are technical problems that need to be solved. But we will see in future years whether the idea is truly good.
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